In today's interconnected world, computer crime knows no age requirements. People of all ages are capable of committing malicious acts online. That includes teenagers. For example, in October 2015, a teenager allegedly breached the email account of CIA Director John Brennan. UK authorities now believe that they have arrested that same individual,...

In today's ever-evolving world, the PC is no longer the sole endpoint found on organizations' networks. It is joined by the likes of servers and point-of-sale terminals (PoS), endpoint devices which are contributing to a growing complexity of modern IT environments. Such change demands that IT professionals rethink their organizations' endpoint...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 13 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-656 on Wednesday, February 10th. Ease of Use (published exploits) to Risk Table Automated Exploit ...

It's one of Microsoft's best kept secrets. First released in 2009, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit from Microsoft (EMET for short) has been helping companies reduce the risk of being exploited via unknown vulnerabilities in Windows and Windows applications. By detecting and preventing the buffer overflows and memory corruption...

It has been a busy couple of months for the web's most notorious exploit kits (EKs). Back in September, researchers detected a ransomware attack that leveraged outdated content management systems (CMS) in order to redirect user traffic to malicious domains infected with the Neutrino exploit kit and Teslacrypt ransomware. Another ransomware attack...

This is the conclusion to a three-part series of building a successful vulnerability management program. The first installment focused on Stage One, the vulnerability scanning progress. Without a foundation of people and process, the remaining stages are prone to failure. The second installment focused on Stage Two and Three, using a vulnerability...

For twenty years people have been running Java in their browsers. And for much of that time, malicious hackers have been exploiting vulnerabilities in the plugin to infect computers. Although the number of outbreaks caused by zero-day vulnerabilities found in the Java plugin has reduced in recent years, many users have found it hard to muster move...

Critical infrastructure is under attack with disastrous implications that could alter our environment, such as disrupting service or even threatening public safety. The Ukraine attack resulting in six hours of loss of power for more than 80,000 customers is a recent reminder. According to an October 2015 report in CyberWarNews, “every bit of U.S....

It’s not much of a stretch these days to say that technology is becoming essential to our daily lives. We trust so much to our technology, from our bank accounts and financial statements to sensitive medical records and even (potentially) embarrassing personal information. We have complex interactions with non-human entities in which we share...

In my previous post in this series, we discussed that a "SIEM" is defined as a group of complex technologies that together, provide a centralized bird's-eye-view into an infrastructure. Furthermore, it provides analysis and workflow, correlation, normalization, aggregation and reporting, as well as log management. In this next post, I hope to answer...

Recently, I introduced a three-part series on how to build a successful vulnerability management program. The first installment examined Stage 1, the vulnerability scanning process. My next article investigates Stages 2 (asset discovery and inventory) and 3 (vulnerability detection), which occur primarily using the organization’s technology of choice...

Last September, CloudFlare detected a large-scale browser-based L7 flood. Over the course of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, 650,000 IP addresses sent out a total of 4.5 billion HTTP requests, with the campaign peaking at 250,000 requests per second. After investigating the incident, the security company concluded that the attack...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 9 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-652 on Wednesday, January 13th. Ease of Use (published exploits) to Risk Table Automated Exploit Easy ...

eBay has patched a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that attackers could have exploited in order to steal users' passwords. A researcher who goes by the name MLT explains in a blog post how he was able to exploit a "fairly basic" XSS vulnerability without needing to resort to any additional measures, such as bypassing the WAF, in order to...

Is using ad blocking software stealing or is it a sound security practice? On one hand, many websites and content creators make money from advertising. They certainly deserve to be compensated for their time and effort. On the other hand, advertising – at best – can be annoying, and at worst, can serve up malware, suck up bandwidth and redirect...

An enterprise vulnerability management program can reach its full potential when it is built on well-established foundational goals that address the information needs of all stakeholders, its output is tied back to the goals of the enterprise, and there is a reduction in the overall risk of the organization. Such vulnerability management technology...

Fancy earning $100,000? Of course, you do. Well, now there's an opportunity to earn a huge reward if you can demonstrate how Adobe Flash can be exploited. Sounds good right? Well, here's the bad news for the rest of us: it's not Adobe offering the money in the form of a bug bounty. Less than a month ago, Adobe proudly announced a series of security...

Researchers have confirmed that a variant of the BlackEnergy malware was behind a power outage that occurred around Christmas Eve last year. Reuters reports that the Western Ukrainian power company Prykarpattyaoblenergo reported on outage on December 23rd that affected an area including the regional capital Ivano-Frankivsk. A subsequent...

2015 was an eventful year for cyber security. Major vulnerabilities, including Superfish, "No iOS Zone" and CVE-2015-2502 made waves in the infosec community, as did a variety of criminal collectives – including Lizard Squad, Phantom Squad and DD4BC – that use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack campaigns to get what they want. Let's also...

Adobe has released an out-of-band security update that fixes 19 'critical' vulnerabilities found in Flash Player. On Monday, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued an alert advising users and administrators alike to refer to Adobe Security Bulletin APSB16-01. In that bulletin, Adobe provides some context on the...